Tuesday, November 9, 2010

McGuinty's lost health-care years

"Re: MRI Services Blur Lines On For-Profit Health Care, Nov. 5.It is incredible that private enterprise are using public medical imaging equipment for profit, whilst the public have to wait many, many months, often in pain, for a MRI or CT scan, when there is an acknowledged unused capacity of public machines. I agree that there should be an alternative for profit health care for those who wish to pay for it, but entrepreneurs in this field should self fund and set up their own operations, even though it is very costly, without it being detrimental or prejudicial to the man in the street." *

We should remember that "self-funding" for equipment requires that there is a legal way to charge for the services to pay for this equipment!Or is Bloch suggesting that entrepreneurs invest only under the state-dominated OHIP monopoly's handouts?The lib-left has freaked out for years at the mere mention of privately-delivered - yet PUBLICLY-PAID - health services: remember the outrage when Liberal Pierre Pettigrew (see Liberal Health care Duplicity, pg.17-18) made that suggestion (and was forced to backpedal) under a sanctimonious Paul Martin, or when John Tory did so (to the sanctimonious outrage of McGuintyites) in 2007?!And yet, how utterly tame those proposals were![... and, that isn't even part of the current discussion now, as most health care is already, as a matter of course, "privately-delivered" (ie - medical professionals aren't (yet, but give the left time...) forced to work as state-salaried employees.]The question now is privately-delivered AND privately-paid health-care, co-existing with the current publicly-funded system.The question is also whether Ontarians should have the right to completely OPT out of OHIP altogether. As it is, McGuinty's Liberals still take our health tax money, but when the Liberal monopoly can't deliver the necessary treatment when patients need it, patients often turn elsewhere to obtain it - paying a second time to get the treatment which they already (supposedly) paid McGuinty for, BUT NEVER RECEIVED. McGuinty's Liberals thus already enjoy keeping revenue from those who already paid into their monopoly system, were failed by the system, and then had to pay again elsewhere.This cosy little side-line scam benefiting McGuinty has to stop as well. Single-payer pushing health-care monopolists should not be allowed to collect the cash, then default on the providing the service.Bloch probably also remembers how Dalton McGuinty's Ontario Liberals essentially nationalized ALREADY EXISTING MRI services in Ontario!! And: these MRI services were 'self-funded'!!So why would anyone again dare risk any kind of health care innovation in McGuinty's Ontario, when this despotic government essentially controls it all, and can simply take you over??To this day Deb Matthews proudly trots out that her Liberals "increased" MRI availability in Ontario, but what she coyly neglects to mention is that this "increase" consisted of PREVIOUSLY PRIVATE MRI'S WHICH WERE TAKEN OVER BY THE GOVERNMENT!(... oh, and yes... that was yet another George Smitherman-led ideological fiasco)Having McGuinty's Liberal health-care despots take over already-in-place private MRI's did nothing but cost the government an unnecessary undisclosed sum of cash.They consolidated and then deceptively claimed that they "increased" the amount of MRI's -when of course, all they did was take away existingMRI's from someone else, and then add them to their now-magically-"increased" count!McGuinty's Liberal monopolist health-care-cutting scumbags have no interest in Bloch's ideas.A planned, phased, de-monopolization process must be implemented.Ontario lost seven years under McGuinty's health care despotism.[see also here]

"Re “It’s time to dump our health-care system” (Nov. 4): Eric Duhaime starts out by targeting the top-heavy administration, which has increased by about 30% in 10 years, and somehow concludes user fees, higher user financing of premiums and more private enterprise will stop the “over-bureaucratization of our health system.”? Huh? And the ultimate conclusion is to dump the system? It’s the vested interests in the system that are eroding it — too many administrative salaries and the demands of public sector unions and too high a reliance on expensive drugs and surgery as the main medical treatments. Who says Americans get “Cadillac services”? The World Health Organization rates the U.S. medical system at 37th in the world compared to Canada at 30th. We spend 10% of our GDP on health care, the U.S. spends 15.3%. In comparison, the U.K. rates at 18th, and spends 8.4%, and includes a cap on drug costs to patients. Trimming the bureaucratic fat and including more complementary health disciplines would go a long way towards alleviating the problems by a) coaching patients towards healthy lifestyle changes; b) using natural therapies that are cheaper and more effective than drugs; c) avoiding the need for surgery and more expensive interventions. Thanks to the Canada Health Act we have universal health care, not socialist health care — doctors are not paid a salary by the state. Someone has been listening to too much American propaganda."*

The propaganda is Willberg's: universal health care is not the same as state-run, single-payer MONOPOLY health care.

Is this really that hard for socialist propagandists to understand? The CHA isn't working: is this also too hard to understand?

Getting the Willbergs out of patients' own health care decisions is the first step. Save your smarmy socialist "coaching" sessions for those who ask; otherwise, leave others to freely decide their own options.[see also here]